America's Fastest Roads

Summer driving doesn’t always mean spending hours sitting in traffic and crawling along the interstate on the way to the beach. On the fastest highways in America, some drivers are blazing down stretches of open road at more than 90 mph.

The fastest car on the fastest road in America clocked in at 94 mph heading northbound on Arizona’s Route 79 between Saguaro National Park and Phoenix earlier this year, according to INRIX, a traffic data company that tracks speeds using vehicle GPS data. On this 39-mile stretch—two lanes wide and almost completely straight for its entire length—the fastest drivers regularly reach speeds of 87 to 90 miles per hour. Arizona’s speed limit is 75 mph on rural interstates and 65 mph on urban interstates.

To determine America’s fastest roads, INRIX first looked for stretches of roadway where motorists routinely floor it, then it found the speed range at which each roadway’s fastest 5% of drivers travel. INRIX multiplied that figure by the length of each road to decide the final ranking. The result is a list of roads where drivers put the pedal to the metal over fairly long distances. Inrix counts the same road separately in different travel directions.

INRIX drew information from its crowdsourced Smart Driver Network, which consists of anonymous GPS data points gathered from from 5 million drivers in consumer and commercial vehicles nationwide, from January through June 15.

This year’s fastest drivers are going a bit slower across the board: The average speed across the 10 fastest roads in America was 81 mph, compared to an average of 85 mph during the same period in 2010.

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